Friday, April 17, 2015

Is the ECB killing democracy?

This young lady, German philosophy student Josephine Witt, jumped on the table when Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, gave a press conference at the headquarters of the ECB in Frankfurt on April 15, 2015. It drew a lot of media attention including images showing her action and her beauty. One commentator admired her elegant jump on the table. Another observed that a guard took her at her breast.

Recently, my wife returned enthusiastically from a talk given at the then occupied administrative centre of the Amsterdam University by Wolfgang Streeck, emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. If you are interested in Streeck's thoughts, you may want to read this article, "The Crises of Democratic Capitalism" (in either English, Spanish or Portuguese).

I intend to eloborate on my previous post when I have time and appetite.

Here is the text of the leaflet Josephine Witt threw around at ECB's headquarters:

We own our own lives -
and in the face of the overwhelmingly powerful external
environment of the ECB’s monetary police,
sometimes it’s hard to remember.

We own our own lives -
and they’re not the chips in the ECB’s gambling game,
not to be played with, not to be sold, not to be devastated.

We own our own lives!
-will be the outcry of those who face repression,
when we begin to see our poverty not as personal defeat or unchangeable destiny.

ECB,
master of the universe,
I come to remind you that there is no god,
but there are people, behind those lives,
and if you rule instead of serving,
you will hear our outcries louder, brighter, inside and outside your halls, everywhere, and you shall deserve no rest.

And while the ECB can only persist in its autocratic hegemony, depending on states of surveillance and police,
finally, the daily violence is enrooted here,
we will find our radical answers
and act with no violence against those human disasters.

Because we will not accept the insane narrative that the ECB wants to
impose to all people wherein even freedom of speech and dignity can be
sold to the bank in order to survive. Persisting in its arrogance
against the people, the ECB increases perilously its own debt to them. A
press conference is not enough to call it "democracy".
I do not expect this illegitimate institution to hear my voice, neither to understand my message,
it would be too much to ask,
but I know for a fact that a lot of people do understand very well the matter.
Today
I'm just a butterfly sending you a sentence, but be afraid more are
coming. We will take back the power over our own lives.
The ECB’s debt is not yet paid.

About Me

As a kid I liked numbers and the sound of strings. I considered studying engineering but chose social sciences because of my interest in people. I combine a theoretical interest with a practical, social approach which brought me to the sphere of policy research. I am interested in reducing the disparity between poor and rich, between the powerful and the less powerful.
In 1973 and 1982 I lived in Latin America. In the mid-1980s, I was able to create an international forum to discuss the functioning of the international monetary system and the debt crisis, the Forum on Debt and Development (FONDAD). I established it with the view that the debt crisis of the 1980s was a symptom of a malfunctioning, flawed global monetary and financial system.
I was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the European Network on Debt and Development that was established at the end of the 1980s to help put pressure on European policymakers.
In 1990, before the beginning of the Gulf War, I cofounded the Golfgroep, a discussion group about international politics comprising journalists, scientists, politicians and activists that meets regularly.
The website of FONDAD is www.fondad.org